There are no shortcuts to success

Right from our childhood we witness various incidents of success and failure. We come across so many instances of how a successful individual is treated by everyone in the society that we cling to the belief that success is everything and if we do not carry the label of success we are 'losers'. Being addressed or considered as a 'loser' for many of us is a terrible feeling. An individual can recollect from the baggage of his memories how a bunch of bullies treated him when he lost in 100 meter running competition or he could not throw a javelin up to an expected distance. Failing in exams, may it be normal annual exams or board exams, is treated as an unpardonable offense not just by friends and relatives but also by most of the parents.

How do we define success?

According to Cambridge Dictionary, "success is the achieving of the results wanted or hoped for" and "success is something that achieves positive results". Taking these two definitions into consideration, success means a child should pass with the number of marks hoped by its parents or relatives or teachers. Success for us is a collection of positive results - positive only when a boy or a girl accomplishes what his/her family member dreamed about.

Success is always used as a parameter to measure an individual's personality. Even a successful person enjoys it only when his achievement is approved by others around him. Hence, success has become objective.

Be a sport, embrace failure and success alike

Failure is just like how a baby falls while trying to walk and success is when that baby invests efforts to get up and walk again. The reason behind complicating such a simple formula is yet to be discovered. When we are okay with falling while walking and again get up to move forward, what is a big deal with failing and then trying again to be successful? All it takes is one's own attitude and approach towards a situation.

Parents have a very important role to play since home is where education originates. Since decent upbringing and proper guidance from parents helps nourish good qualities in a child, they should bring up their child with the values that help the child lead his life with a balanced approach till the end. They can ask their child to work hard and keep trying till he achieves what he has been dreaming about. He may have to climb several steps of failure to reach the summit where success awaits him. So failure should be accepted with a smile to move forward with the enthusiasm to reach success because success comes to those who dare and act.

Success comes only through virtue

Another misconception conspicuously dominant is that success and nothing else matters. It should be grabbed by hook or by crook. This kind of attitude needs to be changed since the adult community of a society is being watched by the younger lot, who strongly believe what they see and follow the same throughout their life. Therefore, the responsible adult class needs to teach the younger members of their families that achieving success in studies, jobs, sports or life in general is possible only by way of virtue.

They should be taught that they have to pass exams through sheer hard work and dedication, not by copying someone else's answers or through malpractice. The same applies to jobs, sports etc. The urge to enjoy success should be nourished but one should know what is the right path to achieve it and what is a real success. A victory accomplished by cheating someone does not last long. It brings further downfall.

The curious case of Bihar board exam toppers

If we take the example of the Std 12 board exam toppers of Bihar, we would understand why success does not come to those who take the vicious path. The two toppers, one from Arts and the other from Science, never studied or prepared well for the board exams because they knew that they could pass without studying. They knew they could pass by paying money to the evaluators. However, the important question here is - who nourished that mentality in them? Their parents. As the two toppers have themselves confessed, they had requested their parents to help them pass the exams not make them toppers. But the unquenchable thirst of the parents to see their kids highly successful made them pay huge amount of bribe to the evaluators and make them emerge toppers.

The above example brings two important issues to the fore - one, the lack of knowledge about the importance of education among the youngsters and their parents; second, both wished for success by hook or by crook irrespective of the consequences. Now, the aforementioned Bihar toppers have been arrested since they failed in the retest also.

So, this incident should work as an eye-opener for many such youngsters who think passing an exam by any means is success, may it be by way of copying or by way of bribing the exam board itself.